Recently I got a new apple box (an M1 MacBook Pro, which is nice, if a bit bulky), and found myself in the need to re-establish my dev environment.
This meant re-compiling various old ruby versions which I need for some projects. The problem is old ruby releases before ruby 3 required an equally ancient version of OpenSSL
I have used RVM for many years and it has a nice integration with MacPorts, my favorite macOS package manager. Getting the ports I need on a new install is straightforward, you just get a list of installed packages from one machine and reinstall them on the other. And RVM knows how to get rubies when you encounter a .ruby-version file, so no issue there.
But there’s a catch: I am using OpenSSL3 for most of my stuff, but I need OpenSSL1.0 or 1.1 to build ruby 2.7.5 and older.
If you google this, you will find plenty of bug reports against RVM, ruby-install, puma and plenty of others, with varying suggestion to use --with-openssl-dir, or setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH, overriding LD_FLAGS, and other incantations.
These may work in some cases, but not all: it seems an underlying problem is that if you have multiple versions of OpenSSL the ruby configure script may end up overriding the openssl-dir setting, and still end up linking against the incorrect library.
Luckily, the solution is pretty straightforward if you ignore all those recommendations 🙂
Try this
- Install OpenSSL3:
sudo port install openssl3 - Install Ruby 3:
rvm install 3.1 - Check that it works and it loads openssl fine, by running something like
ruby -ropenssl -e 'p [RUBY_VERSION, OpenSSL::VERSION]' - Install OpenSSL1
sudo port install openssl1 - Remove v3:
sudo port uninstall openssl3(keep things that depended on it if you want) - Install older rubies:
rvm install 2.7.5 - Check those work too
- Reinstall openssl3
Everything should now work fine, because MacPorts has no issues with multiple library versions sitting next to each other, and each ruby is linked to the appropriate one. Packages that depend on V1 or V3 will also just be happy next to each other.
Notice, I did this once already almost a year ago, and I had totally forgotten about it.
So here’s this small post, in the hope it may help someone, or at least my future self.